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coondoggie notes that the Federal Trade Commission said it was going after three outfits that allegedly made robocalls to sell worthless credit-card interest-rate reduction programs for large up-front fees (as much as $1,495). And reader Cwix tips us that today Google filed a lawsuit against Pacific WebWorks and other unnamed defendants for allegedly using the company's name and logo to promote fraudulent work-at-home money-making schemes. "Kate Lister, author of Undress for Success — The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home, estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends."

It's hardly enough to live on, but I did paid surveys for a couple of months until the novelty wore off and I realised I could do better things with my time.

I'd be sent a link to a survey on some household product (e.g. dishwasher powder) and asked about what I bought, how often I used it, whether I liked it. Then there'd be a new product (or just an idea), and they wanted my opinion on that. The survey took about 15-20 minutes to complete, and they'd send me £3, but they were so dull I got fed up and cancelled my account.

On forums a lot of people race to become "members" of this "panel" [pineconeresearch.co.uk] (they only accept new members occasionally) but I don't think it's worth the effort.

I actually used to work at a company who made paper products. Cards, bookmarks, etc. What was unique to this company, and several others around the US, is that they had elements which were handmade. They needed to be assembled. The company would employ assemblers to work at home. Many of the in-office employees would also take work home. Something simple like a bookmark would pay 3 cents per piece. It doesn't sound like much, but once they learn how to do it efficiently, it's possible--and likely--that assemblers would make over $12 per hour. I made over $300 one weekend. I was single, and all I did over the weekend was put together bookmarks, so that wasn't the standard.
One problem we had was finding new folks to be at-home assemblers. The job we had was legit. We'd post on craigslist and other places that we were hiring for a legit work at home assembly job, and the ads would always--ALWAYS--be marked as spam, or scam, or not legit. The job was a local one. Ie, you couldn't do it over the internet, or the phone. You also did not have to pay any money for materials or supplies. Those to items seemed to help the legitimacy of our ads, and we would include both in the ads, but the reputation referenced by the parent is certainly there.

There are work at home jobs, and many are legit. Unfortunately, scammers have found that there are many many people who will pay lots of money for the convenience of some impossible task that pays pennies.

"Kate Lister, author of Undress for Success -- The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home, estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends."

Say it isn't true. How ever could someone be so cruel as to scam people who just want to do minimal work, never leave the house, and yet still make thousands per week?

Actually, to be fair, I didn't think that many would be scams - I thought a bigger proportion would be money laundering exercises.

I had a roommate in college that I believe was caught up in a money-laundering scam. He was processing magazine subscriptions and he had to give the "company" he was working for access to his bank account. The first week of the "business" they deposited $50,000 into his bank account. They then had a constant stream of $1000-2000 transactions into and out of his account. I tried to warn him but he was making $20/hr and didn't want to believe it could be a scam.

In addition to taking Pacific WebWorks (PWEB) to court, Google said it is continuing efforts to remove scam sites from its index.
The company also said it would permanently disable Google AdWords accounts that provide a "poor or harmful" user experience whether or not they use Google's trademark illegally.

The correct procedure would be to get rid of the "Adwords for Domains" program entirely.

There was a time when geeks found it abhorrent that people would buy up thousands of domain names just to fill a site with adverts and pollute search engine indexes. Then Google made an ad program specifically for people who do this, and suddenly it's not a problem any more.

If I see an advertisement on those Google Adwords or Adsense or whatever, I automatically think they're a scam. It's the same with any and all telemarketers (charities included!), spam email, and junk mail.

If they're not a scam and if they offer a decent service at a decent price, I will probably find them when I'm shopping for services that they offer - regardless if they advertise with Google or not.

They do - "We offer our engineers “20-percent time” so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are among the many products of this perk."

It still exists, however it is up to the engineer to make use of it, and many do not. There are complaints from some that it is too hard to use 20% time now, but the vast majority of these cases are not because a manager or someone is trying to stop the engineer from using it, but because they just feel "too busy" to use it.

I've had an active 20% project for about 1/4 of the time I've been working there, and hope to start on a new one soon.

estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends

If this is true, doesn't the FTC fraud department have it's job already done for it? If it were 5%, the fraud department would have to really work to find a scam, in this case, just click on a link, and viola, someone to prosecute.

estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends

If this is true, doesn't the FTC fraud department have it's job already done for it? If it were 5%, the fraud department would have to really work to find a scam, in this case, just click on a link, and viola, someone to prosecute.

And if only 5% of hits are genuine, it's such a small percentage that it'd be ok to just prosecute and convict all without any investigation. That'd save a ton of taxpayer money!

Or merely that when you're on the phone to your working-from-home colleague, he may be naked?

Actually, it's that when you're on the phone to your working-from-home colleague, he's working concurrently as a webcam stripper. How concurrently? Don't ask. For the love of all that is holy, don't ask.

When I was growing up a movie had this promotion going on in print ads.
A large blank page with just one line segment and this question. "How do you shorten this line without erasing any part of it? See the movie blah[*]".

The solution in the movie was "draw a bigger line next to it". Well, the evil of "why do you care if you have nothing to hide" will be pushed aside by bigger tangible evil of these scammers.

Well, just yesterday they sparked off a row by saying "privacy concerns are for people with something to hide". This bigger row would kick that off the front pages. BTW g and k are both transliterated to the same glyph in most schemes for Tamil.

I'll believe Google is serious about stopping fraud when they make it easier to report the hordes of affiliates of http://www.threestarsinc.com/ [threestarsinc.com] who use Gmail accounts to abuse the craigslist job boards. If you'll check this page: http://www.threestarsinc.biz/ [threestarsinc.biz] they spell out their business plan to use job seekers as a quality target for marketers.
While it may be legit on the the face of it, when combined with their pyramid-like rankings for job applicants who drive more traffic to their sites it h

I get a robocall from "Card Services" every few days. They never phone when I'm at home, so I can't tell
them what I think of them. I also get robocalls offering me a new home security system, and
vacations to various locations.

Advertising saying "Send me £5 and I will tell you the secret of making money". When then send you cash tell them the secret is to advertise saying "Send me £5 and I will tell you the secret of making money"

What you are describing is essentially a pyramid scheme, it often works for the initial entrants but as the number of people involved in the scheme grows it becomes impossible to recruit enough suckers for the scheme to continue.

Does this mean that 5% of the links are actual legitimate opportunities for me to work at home and earn thousands of dollars a week in my spare time?

That seems to be the implied headline: "You can now feel safe to click on our advertisements! We've removed the illegitimate ones!" Of course, not really. Scammers make tons of money from those advertisements and will always have plenty of money and schemes to get more adds.

I used to do this when I was a teenager. It was one of the three classic telemarketing schemes in Montreal (paper rolls for debit machines was next, listings in fake yellow page magazines is the other). Derog is what made me the most money though.

Telemarketing companies would pick up leads that contained a high level of people with debt across many high interest credit cards (regular/department store/etc) and offered them a low interest rate credit card where they can stuff all their debt on to, for the cost of thousands.

The trick to convincing them was:

"But sir, this is not really an out of pocket expense since the interest savings will pay for it."

Since most people on the lead sheets got into the position they are in because they were never good at budgeting to begin with, that line was the line that sealed the deal.

Of course, the caveat to this plan is that you've simply just got a new credit card, and freed up your others to spend more with and really fuck yourself over. So really, the scheme was akin to a sub prime mortgage on your DEBT.

Naturally, when you're sixteen and realize that you could make a hundreds if not a thousand in a week of part time work, the grand scale of what you're doing isn't obvious.

I love how the Internetz has allowed any lazy SOB to be a scammer. What happened to all the hard work you used to have to do in order to "work at home" scam people? Back in the day pre-Internetz, a college roommate of mine answered one of those "stuff envelopes from home" that used to appear in like every college newspaper want ads at the time. It cost like $20 up front or something like that to get the package. When the package arrived, it was basically an envelope with a sheet of paper that said somet

I propose they need to listen to their recorded calls over and over exactly the same number of minutes their robo-callers spent calling people.

AAARGH they waste so much of my time, fax ink, electricity, text messages at 25cents a piece, with absolutely no thought or effort spent on their part, and returning the annoyance would just waste more of my time. At least pan handlers and muggers give you the courtesy to expend some effort getting money out of you.